Parting of The Ways
by Arthur88
Summary: An interpretation of the ending of Trespasser, told from Solas' perspective as he faces the consequences of his meddling and Cyrene Lavellan as she decides the ultimate fate of the Inquisition. Set in the same universe as From the Ashes. Spoilers from DA Inquisition: Trespasser follow
1. Chapter 1

This is one of several short stories set in the Dragon Age universe I've had rattling around in my head for a while that I'm slowly working out; after finishing the brilliant and bittersweet ending that was Trespasser, I wanted to write my own interpretation of the final confrontation between Solas and my Inquisitor Cyrene Lavellan (who has for me become as much a favourite character as Arthur Cousland). I posted this originally a few months back, but I'm reposting it with the original text expanded somewhat, as well as an second chapter detailing the ultimate fate of the Inquisition, which I felt deserved a look at too.

I hope I've managed to convey the impression that the Inquisitor (who in my headcanon regarded Solas as a trusted friend/mentor figure) is quite justifiably furious to learn someone who they trusted has been lying to them since the very beginning (as I would be, as many of us are, I suspect) and willing to cut all ties. I've changed some of the dialogue to replace bits I wasn't fond of or fit in some of the dialogue options I really liked, but hopefully with this I've done justice to (in my opinion) one of the best and most moving parts of the Dragon Age saga.

As to be expected, spoilers for Dragon Age Inquisition: Trespasser follow. Also a brief allusion to The Masked Empire in there as well.

After this and the story I published that preceded it, I promise the next couple of things I write (for Dragon Age at least, I make no promises for anything else!) will be a bit less sombre.

Enjoy!

* * *

"Ebasit kata. Itwa-ost".

"Maaras kata!"

"Your efforts have failed and your men are dead" I snap curtly at the Viddasala, gesturing at the petrified and broken corpses of her soldiers dotted all around the garden beyond us, revelling in her astounded expression at the ease with which I have just dispatched her so-called elite. "Leave now with your life and tell the Qunari to trouble me no further"

I turn away from her and walk towards the glowing eluvian at the end of the path, back to where my ever-growing host awaits for new orders. I hear the Viddasala let loose a roar of desperate rage and the tearing sound of her pulling a spear free from the grip of one of her slain men. She grunts as though hefting the spear, about to throw it; without breaking stride, a single thought of mine is enough to dispatch her the same way as the rest of her Ben-Hassrath thugs. I continue onward along the age-worn path, nothing more to disturb me…

"SOLAS!" A voice I had both expected and dreaded to hear at some point in these events calls out to me. She has arrived. I toy with the notion of continuing to walk away-three more steps and I will be through the eluvian before us, secure in a part of the labyrinthine passageways where even she cannot follow- but I do not. Of all those I have wronged, all those I have used, she has become the one I regret the most. My meddling irrevocably altered her life in ways that she never asked for, made her into the figurehead for a crusade she probably never wanted to be a part of, set her down a path she would never have walked without my intervention. If nothing else, I owe her truth.

I turn on my heel to face Inquisitor Cyrene Lavellan, clad from head to heel in ornate robes of reddish black leather, adorned by armoured gauntlets and pauldrons of silver-plated steel. In the crook of her arm, she holds her helm, the one Inquisitor Ameridan once wore millennia ago…which falls to the ground as she collapses, clawing at her marked hand as if burnt. I stride over to her and with a single gesture, still the raging magic. Cyrene Lavellan slowly gets back to her feet, glaring at me askance.

"That should give us more time. I suspect you have questions"

"How are you able to control the Anchor?" she demands.

"In the same way I kept it from killing you at Haven…though I am stronger now than I was then"

"No doubt your master has taught you a few tricks in the last two years. So where is he?!"

"Where is who?" I ask, confusion writ across my face.

"Your master. Whoever is calling himself Fen'Harel. The one the Qunari you serve as an agent for" she demands, her disbelief at my seeming denial indicating she only has a few pieces of the puzzle. I understand I must give her the full picture.

"The Qunari disregard myth and legend. Had you told them of your encounter with Mythal, they would have dismissed her as a demon. I am no one's agent but my own; I suspect the truth is far more complicated and frightening than the Qunari imagined". I watch her expression change as the wheels turn in her mind and she comes to the only remaining conclusion.

" _You're Fen'Harel?!"_ Cyrene's reaction is one of astounded incredulity, as is to be expected when you tell someone they're standing in the presence of a being their culture has taught them to fear and mistrust since they were a child.

"I was Solas first. Fen'Harel came later, an insult I took as a badge of pride. The Dread Wolf inspired hope in my friends and fear in my enemies…not unlike Inquisitor. You too know the burden of a title that all but replaces your name"

Her reaction is not what I expected; Cyrene's right hand slams into my cheek. My head snaps back at the force of it, and her next blow collides with my nose; through a haze of pain and streaming eyes, I see her pale, tattooed features contort into a snarl, her voice dripping with fury.

"You tricked me. You used the Inquisition for your own ends. You lied to me about _everything!_ "

Her fist pulls back for another blow, but I meet her gaze and her expression becomes one of shock as my irises flash silver. She retreats shrieking as the Anchor flares to life on her palm at my command. Wiping the blood trickling from my damaged nose, I get back to my feet and silence the Anchor's raging. I am not cruel- I will not torture or punish her for her justified anger- but there is much to be said and little time left now to allow unruly emotions to disrupt what must be said between us.

"I understand your anger; were our positions reversed, I would share your fury. I have done more than enough to earn your hatred, but I am not the monster the Dalish paint me to be" I confess ruefully.

"You're _really_ him?""

"I sought to set my people free from slavery to would-be gods. I broke the chains of all who wished to join me. The false gods called me Fen'Harel, and when they finally went too far, I formed the Veil and banished them forever. Thus I freed the elven people and, in so doing, destroyed their world."

"You love the Fade. Why would you create the Veil to hide it all away?"

"Because every alternative was worse."

"Meaning?"

"Had I not created the Veil, the Evanuris would have destroyed the entire world."

"How is that possible?" Cyrene presses me, confusion asserting itself over anger. "From what I saw in the Crossroads, the Evanuris were mortal mages- powerful certainly, but still beings of flesh and blood. _How_ did they come to be remembered as gods?"

"Slowly. It started with a war." I explain sadly, remembering my own time as a soldier in that bloody conflict, the atrocities committed by both sides, the monsters and weapons of destruction engineered by one side and then the other in the desperate pursuit of victory.

"War breeds fear. Fear breeds a desire for simplicity; good and evil, right and wrong, chains of command. After the war came to an end, generals became respected elders, then kings and finally…gods. The Evanuris".

"How did creating the Veil destroy the world?"

I pull back a short distance from her, because I know my next revelation will only stoke the young woman's rage higher. "You saw the remains of Vir Dirthara. The library was intrinsically tied to the Fade, and the Veil destroyed it. There were countless other marvels, all dependent on the presence of the Fade, all destroyed. The legends of your people are half-right. It was not the arrival of humans that caused us to begin aging. It was _me_ " I explain sadly, the guilt I feel as strong now as it was the day I brought everything crashing down. "The Veil took **_everything_** from the elves, even themselves".

I turn away from Cyrene Lavellan, unable to bear the look of mingled rage, disgust and fury in her eyes, knowing that I brought the Elven Empire to its knees and turned our people into slaves and second-class citizens for all the millennia that followed.

" _You_ destroyed our people. You made us beggars and brigands across the world. _WHY?!_ Tell me that, at least. What did the Evanuris do that finally turned you against them? How did they go too far? What could they have done that justified so much destruction?"

"They killed Mythal" I reply sadly, remembering my own hand in finishing the job barely two years ago. "A crime for which an eternity of torment is the only fitting punishment"

' _One that I will accept willingly, once my task is done'_

"But…I thought Mythal was one of the Evanuris?" Confusion crosses the girl's visage.

"She was the _best_ of them" I explain "She cared for her people; she loved and protected them. She was a voice of reason amongst the Evanuris…and they murdered her in their unremitting lust for power".

"You banished the false gods? You didn't kill them if they were guilty of such crimes?"

"You met Mythal, did you not? The first of my people do not die so easily. The Evanuris are banished forever, paying the ultimate price for their misdeeds."

"That's the past. What about the future?" she demands, clearly no longer interested in my attempts to justify history, but wanting to know what I'm scheming on. I pause, uncertain of what to say.

"I lay in dark and dreaming sleep while countless wars and ages passed. I woke still weak a year before I joined you. My people fell for what I did to strike the Evanuris down, but still some hope remains for restoration. I _will_ save the elven people, even if it means this world must die."

" _Why_ does this world have to die?"

"A good question, but not one I will answer. You have shown a thoughtfulness I have _always_ respected; it would be easy to tell you too much" I reply with a rueful chuckle, before becoming instantly more sombre. "I am not Corypheus; I take no pleasure in what I must do, but the restoration of my world means the end of this one" I conclude sadly, before trying to cast the matter from our conversation with a dismissive wave of my hand.

"It is my fight. You should be more concerned about the Inquisition. _Your_ Inquisition. In stopping the Dragon's Breath, you have prevented an invasion of the south by Qunari forces. With luck, they will return their focus to Tevinter. That should give you a few years of relative peace." But Cyrene is unwilling to let matters drop.

"The Qunari said the Inquisition was unknowingly working for agents of Fen'Harel."

"I gave no such orders." I reply defensively, though I know that's not quite accurate. I never controlled the Inquisition. No. I merely guided its course, shaped it, directed it on the best course of action to thwart its enemies. It might not have been me at the organisation's head, but my hand was certainly on the tiller, charting the course. The scowl on Cyrene's face tells me that she thinks exactly the same.

"You led us to Skyhold" she finally snaps.

"Corypheus should have died unlocking my orb. When he survived, my plans were thrown into chaos. When you survived, I saw the Inquisition as the best hope this world had of stopping him. And you needed a home. Hence, Skyhold."

"You gave your Orb to Corypheus?!" Cyrene demands, the outraged incredulity in her voice palpable, no doubt bred from an image in her mind's eye of myself on bended knee like a supplicant before the darkspawn magister, offering up the Orb in my cupped hands to him.

"Not directly" I counter, desperate to explain myself, though judging by the deepening sneer on her face. "My agents left the artefact where the Venatori were sure to find it. The Orb had built up magical energy while I lay unconscious for millennia; I was too weak when I awoke to unlock that power myself, so I required someone who could. I knew the cultists would take it to their master, and that he would not hesitate to use it in pursuit of his ambition of apotheosis. My intention was for Corypheus to unlock the Orb and for the resultant explosion to kill him; once he was dead, I would have reclaimed the Orb for my own" I explain, letting a bitter sigh escape my lips as the memory of how my plan unravelled all but from the start. "I had not anticipated that Corypheus's innate connection to the Blight had made him all but immortal"

"If your plan had worked, if the Orb had slain Corypheus, what would have happened?"

"I would have entered the Fade using the Mark you now bear…then I would have torn down the Veil. As this world burned in the chaos, I would have restored the world of my time…the world of the elves"

"You never cared about us" Cyrene snarls, spitting at my feet in loathing. "All we ever were to you was a means to an end, to clean up your mess and get you what you wanted"

"You were people, and you deserved better…like all those I have used in one hopeless battle after another". I reply sadly. It is the truth, though I know she will _never_ believe it any more than she will want to hear what I have to say next. "You must understand, I awoke in a world where the Veil had blocked most people's conscious connection to the Fade. It was like walking through a world of Tranquil.""

"We aren't even people to you, are we?" The disgust in her voice is plain to hear.

"Not at first." I concede. "You showed me that I was wrong..." I sigh remorsefully " _Again_. That does not make what must come next any easier."

Her gaze darts past me to the glowing mirror, no doubt considering my connection to it, the ease with which my agents have used those artefacts to hinder and thwart the Qunari's efforts, as well as to evade the Inquisition's attempts to stop us.

"You control the eluvians now?"

"Yes" I confirm. "For a time, your old ally Briala controlled a part of the labyrinth. One of my agents was supposed to take that control from her but he failed. I…I had to override the magic personally" I explain, a bitter note entering my voice as I remember Felassan's failure and what I did to punish his defiance, remembering the sound as the blade sank deep into his back. "The Qunari stumbled upon this section independently; with them now gone, the eluvians are _mine"_

Cyrene gnaws her lip as she takes that pronouncement in, no doubt weighing her options, considering that if we are to be enemies, control of the eluvians is sure to give my forces a great advantage. To give herself more time to think on that, she addresses another point I raised that clearly irked her.

"What's wrong with the Inquisition?"

"You created a powerful organisation, and now it suffers the _inevitable_ fate of _all_ such things…betrayal and corruption"

Now it is Cyrene's turn to become defensive. "It's not that simple"

"Do you know _how_ I discovered the Qunari plot? How I lead them to your doorstep?" I retort coldly at her ignorance for believing the Inquisition above such matters, that it and it alone will be the exception. "The Qunari spies inside the Inquisition tripped over _my_ spies in the Inquisition. The elven guard who told you about the Qunari body? Who discovered the gaatlock barrels at the Winter Palace? One of mine"

Anger blooms across her face again at the realisation her Inquisition was not as infallible as she believed. It doesn't surprise me the next words out of Cyrene's mouth are an accusation.

"So you pitted the Inquisition against the Qunari, hoping we'd do your dirty work for you?"

"The mistake was yours to fix".

Anger blooms across her face again, but now it is marred with confusion, as if she is trying to make sense of something she doesn't quite grasp. " _Why_ did you help us? Why bother stopping the Qunari if you're going to destroy the world anyway?!"

"You have shown me there _is_ value in this world, Cyrene. I take no pleasure in what I must do" I insist earnestly, because it is true; I have seen things of wonder and beauty in this world that I would have dismissed when I first awoke, a great many examples of such- courage, loyalty, determination, friendship- displayed by the woman who stands in front of me

"Until the day comes when I must do what I must, I would see those recovering from the aftermath of the Breach free from the shackles of the Qun". Cyrene will know there is truth to that- she knows I have always had nothing but contempt for the Qun and its disciples- but she still seems uncertain.

"But _why_?"

"Because I'm not a monster" I insist with a sad smile. "If this world must die, I would rather its people die in comfort". I still remember the pain and fear of the old elves as the Veil came to live, screaming in terror for their gods to save them as they were left trapped in either this world or those bound to the Fade, forever lost in one or the other. I have no wish to hear such horrible sounds again. I will give this world a cleaner end.

"In any event, it is done".

I can feel the last vestiges of my magic warding her flesh from the Anchor begin to dissipate and meet her venomous glare with sadness.

I'm sorry, da'len, but we are almost out of time" I intone as my wards finally collapses and the Anchor's power erupts back to life with a vengeance. Cyrene screams as if scalded, falling to her knees as she claws at her left arm; the flesh smokes and smoulders as the magic runs rampant, the leather and metal of her robe's sleeve burning away to reveal her arm swiftly turning a translucent green, the bones partially visible as the skin and meat of her arm begins to cook.

"The Mark _will_ eventually kill you; only I could have borne it and survived. Drawing you to this place allowed me to save you…at least for now" I explain, an awkward pause lingering between us. I can save her, but will she welcome it? And if I do spare her life, what will it lead to? I saved her life once and I turned her into a crusader. This time, I fear I may create a monster.

As she looks up at me again, Cyrene's pale green eyes burn with a hatred so intense I am surprised it doesn't burn me. Fighting through the pain, her lips pull back, baring her teeth in a near-lupine snarl as she spits the words "If I live through this, I am coming for you, and I _will_ stop you, by _any_ means necessary". Her eyes darken as she whispers one final promise in elven.

"The next time we meet, Solas… _Ar tu na'din_ "

"I know" I reply sadly, knowing that something I have treasured is as lost now as the Evanuris. I know our friendship is dead. I know that she will devote as much effort to thwarting me as she ever did to stopping Corypheus. I know that one day in the near future, a day will come that will end with the blood of one of us drying on the blade of the other. That between us, in the future, there will be no respite, no consideration for friendship and old comradeship, only war and death.

"I'm sorry" I whisper sadly as I gently take her burning hand in my grip as my free hand closes into a fist and my irises flash silver once again, petrifying her left arm as far up as her elbow. The magic of the Mark will devour the stone but leave the rest of her flesh untouched. A darker part of me wonders if it would not better to let her perish here, but I dismiss it. I have done enough wrongs to her, both unintentionally and knowingly; this is my final chance to balance the scales, one last act of kindness before between us, there will be only war.

"Live well, while time remains" as I take my leave of a woman I cared for, a woman I admired, a woman I so deeply wronged and step through the eluvian to where my host gathers, and where begins such an uncertain future.

* * *

 ** _Translation_**

 _Qunlat_

 _Ebasit-kata. Itwa-ost.: It has ended. You have all fallen._

 _Maaras kata: Nothing has ended/ It is not over._

 _Elven_

 _Ar tu na'din: I will kill you._


	2. Chapter 2

**_Apologies for the delay in completing this; have been dealing with numerous personal problems and other things. Not sure if I'm happy with this, but if I don't draw a line under it and call it finished, I likely never will._**

* * *

Cyrene stormed through the corridors of the Winter Palace: anyone who passed her as she swept through the halls heading for the council chambers saw the look on her face and wisely got out of her way. It had been two days since her parting with Solas, two days since the hunters who'd gone into the eluvian after him returned, Bull carrying Cyrene like a doll, weak and barely alive from her missing arm, back to the shock of all. The healers and mages present, Vivienne and Dorian among them, had worked tirelessly to restore strength and vitality back to her, and both of them had tried to firmly stop her from leaving her sickbed when she'd leapt up in a fury upon hearing the Exalted Council was already in session, but Cyrene Lavellan, hastily getting dressed, pausing only to grab a particular book from a shelf in her chambers, would not hear of it. The sharks could smell blood in the water, but if Ferelden and Orlais thought they'd get what they want without her having a say or putting up a fight, they had another thing coming.

As she entered the vestibule leading to the council chamber, she could hear raised voices arguing. Lord Cyril Montfort's spiel was the one she recognised first.

"I understand the delicacy of the situation, but we cannot afford to lose the Inquisition now! As it is, we stand on the precipice of war with the Qunari!"

"Yes, because this Solas provoked them in the first place!" Arl Teagan roared back as the guardsmen outside the door held it open for Cyrene to enter the chamber. Cyrene rolled her eyes, trying to suppress the urge, once again, to put the arl's aquiline nose out of joint if she got close enough.

Josephine spoke next, trying to be polite, to sound calm and dignified even though Cyrene could hear the notes of barely suppressed stress and annoyance in her voice, having been growing steadily over the course of the negotiations. "The Inquisition _did not_ cause this threat! We informed the summit of the danger-"

"The danger posed by Qunari spies _inside_ your organisation!" Teagan cut across her.

"Without our organisation, you would not be alive to complain about this!" Leliana- _'No, Divine Victoria'_ Cyrene corrected herself mentally- retorted waspishly. Teagan gave a heavy sigh and begrudginly conceded to the Most Holy's point.

"No one disputes the good you have done, but Corypheus is two years dead!"

"If the Inquisition is to continue, it must operate as a legitimate army, not a glorified mercenary band!" Montfort concurred. At that point, the trio sat behind the Council table on the raised dais finally took notice of the elven woman below them, staring like the crowd at the left arm terminating at the elbow, the price she'd paid for what she'd done to end this crisis, as well as a permenant reminder of what all in the Inquisition had sacrificed to allow the wretches around them to complain and criticise the actions taken to save them. In her mind, she heard a multitude of voices- Solas, Leliana, Cassandra, her own- all reverberating inside her head, and their words had more or less formed what she was going to do now.

 _You created a powerful organisation and now it suffers the inevitable fate of such...betrayal and corruption._

 _Two years ago, we railed against the rebel mages and the Grey Wardens for corruption. Look at us now._

 _We could achieve so much more against the Qunari- against any threat- if we're weren't being hamstrung by politicians._

 _At some point, power becomes its own master. We cast aside our ideals in favour of expedience and told ourselves it was necessary, for the people...Will that happen to us? To the Inquisition?_

 _"Never"_ Cyrene whispered to herself. Josephine heard it, a quizzical frown contorting her features at the words, but Cyrene didn't explain, keeping her eyes firmly on the Exalted Council as she opened her mouth to speak.

"You all know what this is" Cyrene declared, holding up the tome with her remaining hand. "A writ from the late Divine Justinia, authorising the formation of the Inquisition. With it, we pledged to close the Breach, find those responsible and restore order, with or without anyone's approval"

Out of the corner of her eye, Cyrene saw Cassandra's mouth twitch into an approving smile at her declaration, no doubt touched that her own words, the ones that had marked the Inquisition's birth, would also mark its end.

"But if the Inquisition now threatens the stability it helped create, it is clear our time is done".

Cyrene's eyes scanned the crowd until she found the familiar face she was looking for and, inclining her head respectfully to Mother Giselle, continued her speech. "Let me beg your indulgence for a moment to explain something. A wise woman I met on my travels once told something about the First Inquisition. She said they waged horrific battles, fought and died without flinching for their cause...and then, when the time came and their work was done, they laid down their weapons and returned home. She said that was the message Justinia wished to convey in restoring the Inquisition; that while its enemies were arrayed before it, the Inquisition would strike surely and without mercy, but when its task was done, it would put away its sword.

This world fell into chaos and disorder nearly a decade ago because the First Inquisition created grew corrupt and decadent, serving its own agenda than the good of all. I will not allow that to happen again. I will not let the sacrifice of all those who died two years ago to bring an end to that madness be in vain by allowing history to repeat itself. The Inquisition _will_ ** _not_** become that which it fought against. We do not have the luxury of complacency or corruption. If this organisation has become too large to do its job, there is only _one_ solution"

Turning her head to the Inquisition 's forces present in the council chamber, Cyrene bowed her head. "To all who served, thank you. It has been an honour and a privilege to work with you...but our war is over, and now the time has come to lay down our swords and return home. The Inquisition is disbanded with immediate effect"

The gasps of shock from the crowd were deafening but Cyrene paid them no heed. She cared nothing for what horror, disappointment, vindication, anger and other emotions they felt at the moment of history they had just witnessed; she had greater matters to attend to than to nursemaid and pander to the complaints of those who'd looked down their noses at the Inquisition when it formed, sat on their hands as it fought tooth-and-nail to stop the world sliding into chaos and now had the gall to complain and hamstring the Inquisition for taking action when it was needed.

 _'The original Inquisition became something new when its original task came to an end. Now we must do the same to fight the enemy arrayed against us...and hope we do not fall into the same decline as our predecessors'._

* * *

 _ **Haven, a week later**_

Cyrene felt a strange sense of deja vu as she entered the chamber that had once been a dungeon below what was left of the Haven Chantry, the same chamber she'd woken up in shackles with the mark burning upon her palm, in what now seemed like another lifetime. She had not come back in here in years, not since that fateful night long ago. The Inquisition had quietly bought the village and surrounding lands from House Durellion two years early; when the Red Templars had attacked it at Corypheus's behest, they'd destroyed every structure and salted the earth; with so much death and the land rendered a wasteland, the noble house had been more than happy to get rid of it, and the Inquisition had surreptitiously established a small stronghold within the ruined Chantry there, known only by the Inquisitor and the highest echelons of the Inquisition, manned by soldiers who'd been there from the beginning, whose loyalty was without question.

Most of the Inquisition and her former companions had gone their separate ways, to return home and rebuild the lives they had left behind to fight, or to try and carve out a place for themselves in the brave new world their efforts had created, but some were already present to greet her, the ones she had always expected would continue this fight; Cassandra to her right, clad in the Lady Seeker's ornate armour, sword belted at her waist, looking ready as ever for war, Scout Harding, surveying the map of Thedas, no doubt wondering the best course of action. The last member of their gathering entered the chamber behind them, Cyrene's ears pricking up as she turned on her heel to see Leliana approach, the former spymaster having dispensed with the robes of the Divine and was once more wearing the leather and chainmail armour under the hooded purple cloak she'd donned in her former role for the Inquistion. Cyrene would later learn the Divine had been en route to Denerim to see her husband and daughter in the Ferelden court before returning to Val Royeux to resume her duties as head of the Chantry; Haven had simply been a detour on the way to deliver grim news.

"My agents have found _nothing_ " Leliana stated grimly. Cyrene knew what that meant: they'd found no explanation for the means by which thousands of elves across Thedas had vanished into thin air- servants, denizens of Alienages, Dalish clans- Solas seemed to be making no distinction in gathering his forces. _'They have to be answering his call'_ she knew _'but how? And where are they going?'_ So far the efforts of this last vestige of the Inquisition to find where Solas had gone after he'd taken his leave of Cyrene, to locate where he might be hiding, what place he might be using as a staging ground for his forces had yielded nothing.

"With control of the eluvians, he could be anywhere"

"With the Inquisition officially disbanded, we have no army, no formal alliances, meagre resources" Cassandra noted grimly.

"We have what we truly need" Leliana countered,a point Cyrene agreed with to a degree. Though nowhere near as strong as it had been, the Inquisition in its current form was far from powerless; donations of support from allies such as Leliana, Josephine and Varric, to name but a few, sent covertly were keeping the group afloat, allowing them to establish something of an infrastructure for more covert actions to hinder the elven rebels, and they were steadily building their forces in secret, vetting the die-hard veterans in hope of having sufficent forces ready when this conflict came to open war. _'For now, however, our war must be fought in secret, hidden in shadows...and the best we can hope for is that our new form has spared us the threat of having to watch our backs, for fear that our own people have knives at their backs and a different cause in their hearts'._

"We will need to be careful" Cassandra still protested. Leliana nodded in agreement, both women studying the map before them, deciding which place to concentrate their efforts

"Solas knows _everything_ about us. Who we are, how we work, our strengths and weaknesses..."

"Then we find people he _doesn't_ know about" Cyrene insisted, jabbing a pin into a particular point on the map before her. Cassandra, Leliana and Harding all looked incredulously at her when they saw the place she had marked. _Minrathous._ Harding looked intrigued, having clearly not thought of that, while Cassandra and Leliana looked deeply wary at the choice. While the Venatori were long dead, all remaining traces of their zealot ideology exterminated with the fall of their so-called god, Tevinter was far from a stable landscape; they still remembered Dorian's testimony back when he'd joined them after Redcliffe that many amongst the Imperium's elite would have thought the Venatori had the right idea in what they were trying to achieve, and given the renewed ferocity the Qunari were prosecuting their offensive against the declining Imperium in the wake of Dragon's Breath's failure, the expression on both women's faces said quite clearly they thought investing their strength in the Imperium would cause more problems than it would solve, both of them looking to hear the reason why.

"We _will_ stop Solas...by _any_ means necessary" the former Inquisitor stated simply. Despite its decline, Tevinter, as Dorian had once called it, had been the cradle of civilisation in Thedas. The ancient magisters had plundered the libraries and treasuries of the ancient elves when the Imperium conquered Arlathan, and perhaps, in the archives of the Magisterium or the private collections of the Imperial Senate, there might be something that could give them an insight into the workings of the Evanuris, that might let them turn the tide against Solas's plans, both for her and Thedas.

 _'You taught me the necessity of doing what must be done, of giving everything in the name of a cause. You cannot expect me to do any less for you than I did for Corypheus. I am sorry, Solas; I respected you as a teacher, loved you as a friend...but I won't stop, I won't back down...and I won't show mercy, not even to you, not when your sins demand justice, not when you seek to become what you once hated. You made me into this warrior with your meddling; I will save this world from you, even if you make me your destroyer to do it'._


End file.
